Even the blind-Helen Keller was able to see beyond her darkness to understand life as a journey which must be full of adventures when she said “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
As the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, Helen Keller could boast of having taken that daring adventure, considering her circumstance and what was a reasonable possibility of people of her kind, in those days. Beyond that, she lived as a prolific author, breaking the chains of deafness and blindness with a quest to become adventurous, unrestrained by fears of mistakes and failures…
What has your life become? A repetition of routines, backed by brilliant skills you’ve already acquired? That makes it a well comfortable life, living it all within your fine boundaries with no pinch of the daring adventures that your life should actually have.
Taking any sort of adventure—be it career or relationship can be frightening. Making an adventure a “daring one” even goes beyond that, it increases the shock levels, the risks and the possible unbearable consequences, but life without all these will leave you partly fulfilled with so many ‘What IFs’.
There are countless possibilities out there for us all, but for comfort and content reasons, we’ve boxed ourselves in what we have, have achieved and even when we make one step towards that daring adventure needed to bring the needed excitement into our lives, we quickly move 5 steps back, far from where we were.
I can’t imagine what life will be for some of us without those daring adventures caged in foreseeable and unforeseeable risks. Interestingly, the more we examine the various risks, the more backwards we move—without realizing we are robbing our short existence of some of the greatest and fun memories we can possibly ever have.
Life is short people say, and I say, it is even shorter than we all think. The years you will live does not determine how short or long your life was, rather what you actually did with those years—and the experiences, secrets and joy which will go down with you should be the measure of your true existence, anything else is bonus.
To me, the man or woman without mistakes, scars and lingering secrets is the person who has not lived at all, has been here and done the easy part of life. Your life should be demarcated by the memories you have, the knowledge you’ve acquired and all the other things you will be buried with. Once again, every other thing like the houses, families, friends and money that you will leave behind are not yours, they remain the bonuses of your existence. Whatever is yours, you should be able to go down the grave with it.
I remember clearly my last day at Adisadel College when most of our mates were writing their nicknames with white paint on the walls. Despite knowing the inscriptions would be removed by the next Monday when they are gone, many wrote things like ‘Bob Satan was here some’, ‘Twesparoo passed through’ among others.
When it came to me, there was no need to write anything. Apart from the fact these guys were wasting their time because of the imminent removal of what they were writing; my years on campus was a daring adventure—academically and off the books. I knew for sure that, until the first year students leave (3 years to come) and even beyond, my name will be on the lips of so many and the memories will live on… How are you writing down your impact? With a paint that can easily be cleaned or with strange and daring adventures engrained in memories?
What has your life experience been? The more mistakes you’ve made, the higher you’ve pushed yourself beyond your capabilities and the more memories you will have to take home with you—that one day, when you will have to leave behind all those things you’ve all along falsely thought are truly yours.
I cherish adventures, as much as I cherish mistakes—in fact; they seem to be the same as one breeds the other. If there is anything you so much want to do in life, now is the time to spark the engine, fuel your passion, live the obsession and take charge of your existence.
When people talk about mistakes and how wasteful some journeys they took were in their lives, I look at them and say, you did not have a wasteful journey, you had a daring adventure but you probably did not enjoy it because you failed to recognise it.
I spent 2 years in a College studying a subject I did not like but I will never talk ‘slack’ of that adventure and the 2 long years’ adventure shaped me into something else. I enjoyed the adventure and left with at least far enough knowledge on a subject I would probably never have known.
I grew up on adventures, entrenched in the aftershocks of the many ‘Adventures of Tintin’ books I spent my valuable study time reading—while my mates read the boring ‘Mensah and Dede’, just because that was expected of them and they needed that to pass the exams.
I recently took an adventurous 16-17 hours road trip from London to Cannes which created about 1000 euros hole in my bank (fuel, exorbitant tolls and overnight hotel stays) when a flight from London to Cannes would have cost me less than 70 pounds and under 2 hours. But you cannot compare any amount of money to the experience and memories of that long road trip—experience and memories I will take down with me to the grave.
I think I have been a risk taker all my life, on a constant search for that daring adventure which will not only uplift my being, but drag me back—somehow, because with risks come mistakes. And with all these come that feeling of “Hmmm” which you can fake but it will NEVER have the same relief or discomposure.
Despite our careful lives, each of us has those things we so much want to do and will remain a wish for many people, except those who are daring enough to set the adventurous ideas in motion.
If Helen Keller could rise beyond what was normal, expected and planned for someone like her to live that daring adventurous life, what stops you from taking that long but exciting journey to your land of adventures.
Without these daring adventures, life is nothing at all…
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